| Shadow1980 said: In a FPTP winner-take-all system, voting third-party is most certainly wasting your vote. This is not only because in such a system "strategic voting" usually results in just two major parties where those who are not members usually have no chance of winning (those that have won major offices have all or nearly all ran as independents, and were usually established politicans from a major party before becoming independent), but also because of the spoiler effect that can be caused by those who don't vote strategically for a major party candidate. We found that out the hard way in 2000. Even ignoring the anachronistic Electoral College (no other advanced nation selects their head of state in the fashion we do) and focusing just on Florida, Bush won that state with a mere 537-vote lead, less than 0.01% of all ballots cast. However, he did not win a majority of the votes in the state, only a plurality. Had everyone who voted for Nader had voted for Gore instead, Gore would had won a slim majority in Florida. Now, a lot of those Floridians who voted for Nader might have stayed home if he didn't run, but certainly a lot of them would have likely voted Gore as Nader voters skewed left and probably disliked Bush a lot more than they did. Point being, the results would have likely been different if Bush and Gore were the only two candidates, or there was some sort of runoff system when no candidate gets a majority in the first round of voting (which was also the case in nine other states). Ideally, the Electoral College should be abolished and replaced by a national popular vote, and all federal elections should require a candidate to get a majority to win, which would necessitate some sort of two-round system or IRV system. Unfortunately, the electorate is simply too complacent and the elected too vested in maintaining the status quo to bother changing anything. |
This is assuming the only value in voting is winning or not. As I mentioned in the OP, third parties can influence the first-party positions and government policy, even if the third party itself doesn't win elections. Why? Because they represent the ideology of lost voters whom could've been used against the other major party. It makes them a group that is more easily identifiable than the nebulous and ambigous "independents." Furthermore, there is nothing preventing the major parties from changing, even if the system is designed for only two. This happened quite frequently in early American history. Federalist, anti-federalist, Democratic-Republicans, and Whigs were all major parties before the Democratic party and GOP.
